This will make your day. It sure made mine.

[Photo Credit: Susan NYC]

Check this out:

Before I walk into an elevator I look up at the mirror. Force of habit from when I was a kid. Maybe “Dressed to Kill” got into my head. More likely, it’s a reflex I developed growing up in New York during a time when you expected to get mugged at any moment. I know it might be extreme now, but the mirror is there for a reason. When the elevator doors open I brace myself and look up at the mirror. Just in case.

Going to the movies in a snowstorm? Now, that’s a good idea. I saw “The Color of Money” during a blizzard. What movies have you seen in the theater when it was snowing outside?

[Photo Credit: Pete Turner via the incredible site, This Isn’t Happiness]

The sun is bright today and we haven’t seen any snow yet in New York. With only a few days before Christmas I’m sure there are some who’d like to see that change.

In the meantime, check out another wonderful photo gallery from our pals at How to Be a Retronaut.

[Photo Credit: Alfred Stieglitz]

The street photography of New York in the 1980s by Jamel Shabazz still sings.

Peace to How to Be a Retronaut (the gift that keeps giving).

Over at the New York Review of Books, here’s Bruce Davidson on taking pictures on the Iron Horse in the early ’80s:

In the spring of 1980, I began to photograph the New York subway system. Before beginning this project, I was devoting most of my time to commissioned assignments and to writing and producing a feature film based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel, Enemies, A Love Story. When the final option expired on the film, I felt the need to return to my still photography—to my roots.

I began to photograph the traffic islands that line Broadway. These oases of grass, trees, and earth surrounded by heavy city traffic have always interested me. I found myself photographing the lonely widows, vagrant winos, and solemn old men who line the benches on these concrete islands of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

I traveled to other parts of the city, from Coney Island to the Bronx Zoo. I revisited the Lower East Side cafeteria where I’d photographed several years before. The cafeteria was a haven for the elderly Jewish people surviving the decaying nearby neighborhoods. I photographed the people I had known there, survivors from the war and the death camps who had clung together after the Holocaust to re-root themselves in this strange land. I walked along Essex Street to visit an old scribe who repaired faded Hebrew characters on sacred Torah scrolls. He and his wife, both survivors of Dachau, worked together in their small religious bookstore. Occasionally, he’d allow me to take a photograph as he bent over the parchment with his pen. When the flash went off, he would wave me away. I would return later with prints that he put into a drawer, carefully, without looking at them. Sometimes, returning from his shop during the evening rush hour, I would see the packed cars of the subway as cattle cars, filled with people, each face staring or withdrawn with the fear of its unknown destiny.

Dig the book, a cherce holiday gift.

Oh, hell, and while we’re at it:

Check out this gallery of New York City photographs by Stanley Kubrick.

From How to Be a Retronaut, where else?

As a kid, the scariest neighborhood I could think of outside of Harlem was Alphabet City. It was a world away from the Upper West Side, which had its tough blocks and dangerous stretches. I heard about Alphabet City in frightening terms, as in “You don’t want to go down there.” Then, when I was thirteen, I remember this movie poster:

I never saw the movie and it would be years until I went downtown to that neighborhood. By the time I got there it was called the East Village.

[Photo Credit: Ribonyc]

I’ve never gone to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade but I have an uncle who used to go every year. It was one of those things that he couldn’t imagine not doing and didn’t understand why everyone didn’t feel the same way he did.

The floats are cool, though, aren’t they?

Over at Codex 99, check out this cool post about subway tiles.

Check out this photo gallery of Penn Station over at Retronaut.

I found it difficult to look at these pictures without feeling torn up.

Big city of dreams.

Pictures of New York by Louis Faurer via Everyday I Show.

Our good pal Mark Lamster had a long piece in the New York Times last Sunday. You don’t want to miss it:

IT sounds like something out of a dime novel, or maybe a Nicolas Cage film. Behind the mute facade of a largely windowless neo-Gothic tower lies an ingenious system of steel vaults traveling on rails. Within those armored containers, which have been in continuous use since the Jazz Age, are stored some of New York City’s most precious objects and, presumably, a good number of its darkest secrets.

This building actually exists, and you will find it on an otherwise unremarkable stretch of Second Avenue, just north of the end of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. It is the Day & Meyer, Murray & Young warehouse, and since it opened in 1928 it has been the storage building of choice for many of New York’s wealthiest families, most prestigious art dealers and grandest museums.

The company’s early client list reads like a condensation of the New York Social Register, with names like Astor and Auchincloss, du Pont and Guggenheim, Havemeyer and Vanderbilt prominent. The press baron William Randolph Hearst stored entire rooms bought in Europe there during the construction of his castle at San Simeon, Calif.

Congrats to Mark for the story, and another job well done.

Where else but Retronaut?

More NYC goodness from Vivian Maier (via Retronaut):

Ah, the Old Days…

I remember it well.

Recognize most all of these spots. This one here (below) was on 49th street between Broadway and 7th Avenue. When I first worked as a messenger in the Brill Building, summer of ’88, you couldn’t walk a city block without running into a porno theater. I remember making runs from 49th and Broadway down to the Technicolor lab which was on 44th street between 8th and 9th, seeing the viles of crack cocaine scattered along the sidewalk, and being propositioned by the hookers with bruises on their legs and arms. I moved fast in those days.

This trip down memory lane has been brought to you by Mitch O’Connell. In six parts: one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Peace to Cliff C for point out this New York City greatness.

Bernice Abbott (1954)

New York in the Sixties, by James Jowers.

Retronaut wins again (and so do we).